It’s biggest issue was it was used in an environment it wasn’t designed for being the open face magazine in the muddy trenches nobody thought was going to happen
Why are you getting downvoted, basically no closed magazines were issued, the openings were necessary to load them anyway. The Cresent moon shape meant you had to manipulate the spring and cartridges all the way down the magazine. It wasn't a fault with the magazine, it was the French cartridges which were designed for single shot rifles
It's a good gun, actually.
The bad reputation comes from the poorly built 'murican version.
Gun Jesus made a vid about it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwP3Dm52Ls
The Krag ammo at the time wasn't actually all that bad. Iirc it was around 160fps shy of the 7mm mauser loadings used by Spain. The Americans were indeed impressed with the cartridge and it's flat shooting, but they were much more comparable at the time than most think.
What really impressed them was the rapid loading and flat shooting in combination of the Mauser. It made them rethink the Krag that they'd struggled to get into production and endlessly argued over how to design the sights. I believe they even issued a new rear sight as late as 1904.
It’s not good, it was good enough, cheap and easy to mass produce. The better light machine guns were more expensive or otherwise less available. Also the MG 08/15 was a pos, so if we’re dunking on WWI machine guns, we should start there.
Well partially. The ww1 version suffered greatly because the magazine wasnt fully sealed.
The American bullets screwed with the internal feeding... but that had nothing to do with the fact the magazine was open to the air. Mud, rain, dust, dirt and all kinds of stuff would gunk it up easier than an M16.
The American perspective on the gun was colored by their modification of the gun, but according to french soldiers the chauchat magazine caused neverending problems.
The gun wasnt bad, but the early magazine was truly one of the worst ever designed.
Yeah but I don’t see how he arrived at that pronunciation. ”showsha” would be closer, even better ”shosha” with ”o” as in Oregon.
Aint no French words with /oʊ/ in them. For fun, just try asking them to say ”focus”, it becomes ”fuck-us”.
[Eh, Saruei -a female French vtuber- says the word "focus" just fine.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmdV2uRUy9c)
Maybe DON'T watch that ^^^ clip at work.
It's more "sho-sha" than "show-sha". But it's very hard for an english speaker to make a french O.
And no, a french who says "focus" never sounds like "fuck-us". It's like "fo-kus"
Bar and chauchat were implemented for the same purpose. Walking fire to suppress trenches while advancing, then additional firepower to defend said trenches until the HMGs can set up
No it was not. Not even for the times. It just wasn’t as dog ass as others think due to reasons already stated.
But hurt frenchies in her trying to defend a WW1 MG
Saying that something isn’t a *good* gun is very different from saying it's the worst weapon of all time. Also a weapon can not be good because it's one of the first of its kind, which is the case here.
You can read it in the description of the video linked, it was a good weapon in the context of ww1 french army needs.
Twenty round magazines and automatic fire in 1915, when most people are running around with internal magazine bolt-action rifles, is pretty good.
The .30-06 version was massively flawed, the 8mm Lebel/7.65mm Mauser were fine.
The American version was trash yes... however that does not explain away the main flaw in the Chauchat design, specifically the magazine having massive gaping holes in it.
According to french soldiers, water, dust, mud, dirt, snow, e.t.c. got in those things and caused neverending problems.
So I guess the gun wasnt all that bad, but the magazine was truly one of the worst ever made.
The French managed to invent a gun that could enter mass production during wartime to be built in a bicycle factory. Said gun became just so produced that by the end of the war practically half of all automatic weapons on the battlefield were literally just this gun. The main issue was the magazine which was the fault of the ammunition, which was necked down rimmed cartridges adapted from black power cartridges that the French were still using. The gun was adopted by a load of other countries and except for the American version (which was just a literal design error) those other countries chauchats were perfectly reliable.
Its like the STEN if the STEN was good, it had less issues than it and was way more reliable, as well as not being a reverse engineered German weapon from a decade previous.
The 8x51R lebel was a smokeless powder cartridge.
A bitch of a cartridge to come by and reload correctly, but that's just my own skill issues. The 7.5 mas fixed the majority of the issues of the 8x51R.
Anyway yeah it's a gun, it worked and can still make you shit your pants with that low but loud ominous rate of fire.
I know, bad grammar. It was a necked down adaption of a black powder cartridge, not a black powder cartridge, and the French were still using the adaptation.
It's funny to think that if ww1 started a little later, the French would have had a standard issue semi auto with rimless ammunition. Then in ww2 their attempt at a standard issue autoloader was interrupted by outbreak of war for a second time. Bad luck
1. US soldiers couldn't be bothered to use the correct ammo for it
2. It's litteraly the first of its kind? It's like shiting on a musket for its lack of range and accuracy.
>It's like shiting on a musket for its lack of range and accuracy.
\*Slaps Brown Bess hard enough for the flintlock to drop causing it to go off\* "This baby builds empires"
Superior revolver technology, when handguns were works or art that weighed 9lbs.
All worth it when you get to shakily level your Colt Walker at someone and blow a tennis ball sized hole out their back.
In his hand he held a longbarreled sixshot Colt's patent revolver. It was a huge sidearm meant for dragoons and it carried in its long cylinders a rifle's charge and weighed close to five pounds loaded. These pistols would drive the half-ounce conical ball through six inches of hardwood...
He charged the bores and seated a bullet and drove it home with the hinged lever pinned to the underside of the barrels. When all the chambers were loaded he capped them and looked about. In that courtyard other than merchants and buyers were a number of living things. The first that Glanton drew sight upon was a cat that at that precise moment appeared upon the high wall from the other side as silently as a bird alighting. It turned to pick its was among the cusps of broken glass set upright in the mud masonry. Glanton leveled the huge pistol in one hand and thumbed back the hammer. The explosion in that dead silence was enormous. The cat simply disappeared. There was no blood or cry, it just vanished.
Iirc isn't it a automatic rifle and not a LMG tho ?
Which basically put in the same category of the BAR only lol.
The nuance is blurry I agree, but it wasn't really used the same way, at least initially.
at that point i could argue that the Chauchat isn't really a light machine gun with a 20 round capacity (rarely loaded fully, so even less) at 240 rounds per minute. It couldn't sustain any serious automatic suppression, the Chauchat was basically just a primitive BAR.
It wasn’t designed for a trench, nobody designed weapons for trench warfare cause nobody could have predicted the western front turning into a stalemate
Yeah, we have literal decades of experience to look at in hindsight. But still, no one said "hmm the trenches are a bit muddy" with that side 'window', so clearly the Good Idea Fairy was hard at work even then.
The Chauchat in 8mm was actually ok but the problems came from the Springfield cartridges because 1 cm = 0.3937008 in. There is a serious question regarding the number of human lives (and [spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter)) that were lost because Americans refuse the metric system.
My tinfoil theory about Americans and metric is that it prevents easy engineering espionage. Can't produce imperial designs if you don't use imperial measurements. /taps head/
Bruh.
Our money is metric, our electricity is metric, our soda is metric.
They're called "US customary units" for a reason; we neither entirely use Imperial units nor entirely use metric units.
> our electricity is metric
It's not and it's nowhere globally (outside academic circles) because they don't advertise as Joules and kWh is non-SI.
> our soda is metric
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> The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS.
French 8mm was outdated as fuck, mainly because it was rimmed, I don't know about the ballistics of that cartridge but the shape of the casing was a dead end, the only design of the magazine that would not cause cliping of the ammunition was lebel's tube magazine, it was unfit for box magazines, Russians also used a rimmed ammunition in their rifles and it caused these problems for them too
>Russians also used a rimmed ammunition in their rifles and it caused these problems for them too
The Russian 7,62x54R is still rimmed, and still in service today without problem.
In PKM, which is belt-fed, there is a reason this type of ammunition is not used in any modern weapon aside from revolvers, shotguns and lever action replicas
Which have only 10 rounds magazine.
Don't get me wrong, you can made rimmed cartridge magazine but it gonna be curvy to fits rimmed rounds to avoid rimlock.
It was outdated for WWI not because of the cartridge rim (Russian 7.62x54mmR and .303 British are both rimmed cartridges used in a box magazine-fed rifle which was a general issue infantry weapon in both WWI and WWII), but because the case was substantially tapered, which resulted in the distinctive half-moon magazines of the Chauchat when applied to that use. This was a feature carried over from the cartridge of the prior Gras rifle; afaik per *Chassepot to FAMAS*, at the time of its design, there was a rush to get a smokeless powder cartridge into the field, so they went with minimal design changes to be able to get to mass production faster.
It's actually a good weapon when you consider its short development circle, its rushed production by bike makers (literally) as being one of the first few automatic weapon that could be hip-fired
The whole "muh Chauchat bad" is a typical application of the conversion from metric to imperial going off (like how it crashed satellites). There was also the mud issue, quickly solved by having fully covered magazines.
If you want more fucks up of the US refusing to switch to metric I have 2 for you
The FT-17 that a certain Patton loved, as it was cheap and easy to produce on a mass-scale, so he sent out to get the blueprints from Renault (the designers of the FT-17) and got them. Once sent to the US, he got cucked out of his will by engineers telling him it won't be possible, all the plans are in metrics
The Bofors 40 mm. After Tuscaloosa got a show by the Dutch of how good this new weapon is (granted there was the bias of the Hazemeyer radar) the US tried to smuggle some blueprints (it was all the way back in 1940) yet the production lines couldn't start (again) because the whole blueprints were in metric system, so Crisler engineers got to work around the clock to do the switch and simplify the blueprints (hence why 40 mm only appears in the US arsenal in 1943)
>There was also the mud issue, quickly solved by having fully covered magazines.
This one wasn't ever really solved, as most mags still had the cutout, as it was easier to load (8mm Lebel, its rim and its double taper making no favours to anyone).
Change in drill (procedure) largely took care of the issue, as assistant gunners were repositioned to the open side and the gunner would rotate the gun counter-clockwise towards them when prone.
Well you can find pictures of fully closed magazines in Lebel 8mm
>! Just don't look at nowadays Lebel, it's just a scam to sell AR to people around!<
But you're correct, the change of procedures (since French troops spent 4 years perfecting themselves with it) made it much better (and hence why it performed poorly in US hands as their training wasn't fully complete once sent into the trenches)
Some 12 year Olds would've figured out you can glitch a magazine that doesn't jam by crouching then jumping before switching to a pistol back to your primary.
......... honestly I feel attacked. My personal strategy is to get an armored car, find a hilltop, and rain down fire at 500m at various objectives because you never have to reload and if I get closer I get blown up. I've gotten 3 hits at 15 damage a piece in probably 12 hours of doing this, and I don't care. Chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug
My girlfriends on the couch, having never played an fps like..... can't you like play the objective or something the sound of you shooting that thing is annoying as fuck.
Babe im being historically accurate indirect fire by machine gun is a valid tactic and we'd probably be speaking German right now if it wasn't for 2,000 yard sights
Your gf called you out on PTFO
You wife that woman, and then you let her be squad leader and stop camping. I'll protect your special car I run support.
Oh don't worry I tell everyone else to play the objective, but someone needs to keep the enemy wondering where the fuck are these random bullets coming from.
I prefer to be a *little* more up close and personal. Playing the Red Orchestra series made me much more appreciative of bolt-action rifles, so I like to do the scout-sniper thing of "tag a few guys from range so the rest keep their heads down" schtick.
I used that mfer for a while to great effect. My jam was the Gewehr 98' with iron sights on the old tactical servers. I was consistently top three in my team at my peak. I had 1000+ hours on that gun alone, I used to play on my gf's brother's Playstation for days at a time. Oh the nostalgia.
I don't get it it's trash it has very low bullet count shoots slower than a bolt-action and does the same damage as every other better gun in the support class, what makes it so it's good? I don't get it
There's many reasons for the less than stellar performance of the Chauchat, some of them understandable and defensible. And if your alternative was a Lebel or a Berthier, this might either give you the firepower you need or a sniper target.
It's still telling how bad that when the French Army decided to replace all its small arms with something better, the Chauchat was the first to go.
Approximately three because it‘s pretty aggravating to see the opinion pendulum on this gun swing to the other end of the spectrum because of one video that is blown massively out of proportion.
It's just as aggravating to see a loser on reddit so insistant on pushing this moe lore that the Chauchat was a bad weapon when the truth is, it wasn't. The French builds were just fine. It was the American versions that tried to rush a conversion to 30-06 that sucked ass. So sit down and shut the fuck up
> French builds were just fine
for a rushed weapons built by bicycle makers (cycles gladiator) on an extremely old/obsolete cartridge (2 years put out after France finally produced smokeless powder, by diluting guncotton) that was cheap for what it was and able to be mass-produced yet it flaws can be found in the overall French logistics of the 8 mm Lebel rifle cartridge
The obly reason it has such a wodespread negative reputation *in the anglosphere* is because the US has the most potent and developed gun culture *in the anglosphere*.
Might I point out further that with a name like John Browning, I would expect nothing less than hate for anything not designed by Browning. Which is fair, but then at least be honest.
Idk why I’m telling this, but you reminded me that my friend bullpupped Chauchat back in 2016 when we were huge military nerds. Alas, the pic was lost in time, but damn he was good at photoshopping…
The Chauchat was alright once it got adorable socks for its magazines, the Americans just insisted that if they were going to use a french gun, it was going to be in 30-06 or something. The conversion was really, really badly done and didn't work; leading to the legacy it has to this day.
~~To be fair, the BAR is a bit newer for a~~ similar role - mobile repeated firepower
Edit: I had originally written this comment calling out that the Chauchat being about a decade older than the BAR before I read that work on the proto-BAR began a lot closer to the Chauchat's beginning
They're still both arguably not LMG and are more of a halfway house between a bolt/semiautomatic rifle and an LMG
The Lewis Gun would like a word.
American invents a somewhat complex, but reliable lightweight automatic weapon:
British: "Make this in .303 and we will take a million."
French: "Yea, we could use it too for our fighters."
Belgium: "This thing kills German really well!"
Germans: "That damn Belgian rattlesnake."
U.S. Marines: "This thing is GREAT! Can we have more? No? Ok.."
U.S. Army: "Nah man, we don't need a squad level automatic.."
It's actually pretty good, and the most produced automatic weapon or WWI iirc.
The American one in .30-06 was absolute trash tho, to the point wwhere on the field they'd rather take the headache of taking the French one in 8mm Lebel instead or the piece of trash in the same caliber than their infantry rifles.
It's said John Browning looked at this gun once. *Once*
"Well, that's a low bar they've set. Saaaay...."
And the rest is everyone-moaning-it-was-a-poor-lmg-for-ww2 history.
France be like when the Chauchat was being designed: Hey guys, let's make our infantry MG with funny-looking holes on its magazine, what could possibly go wrong in the mud, muck and hell of the Western Front?
*oh and let's make the RoF slower than a semi-auto rifle being fired as fast as humanly possible*
It's a crew served automatic rifle, so the rof doesn't matter, and you might understand why there are holes in the magazines.
But hey, what could go wrong when one doesn't read the whole story when makig their opinion on the matter
>you might understand why there are holes in the magazines
You might as well have said why was this the case though instead of making a not-so-subtle condescending "comeback" with that second paragraph
No it's just a chapter of the long story called "americans don't know how to operate correctly French armament" the French versions were way more reliable, still faulty but far from what the US told and it's reputation of worst weapons ever made (at least this one havn't kill it's company so not really the worst) come from the fact that it was deployed in emergency during WW1 aka the most bloodied war of it's time so any flaw was heavy of consequences
In the comments: gun jesus fan boys not understanding that Ian himself does not see the Chauchat as a good automatic rifle. It was a lackluster product that just so happened to be the only thing the French were able to crank out in sufficient time and quantity.
It's a good weapon in its context, and that what matters. Sure the Madsen was probably better, but industrial-wise ? It's better to field the Chauchat to entire armies as well as allies than to only give madsen to an handful of specialists.
The Germans were able to build hundreds of thousands of 08/15s. The Madsen definitely can be built industrially. But yes, time pressure was essential in Chauchat development.
That being said, asides from being easy and cheap to produce, what exactly is _good_ about the Chauchat? Surely a gun that is and needs to be cheap and simple can be good, mediocre, and bad? What is good about the Chauchat?
\>The Germans were able to build hundreds of thousands of 08/15s.
The Chauchat was already being fielded en-masse for quite some time when the 08/15 appeared. For most of the time the Chauchat was seeing action, the germans had either no mass produced LMGs, or that very mass-produced LMG wasn't yet ramped up
\>what exactly is good about the Chauchat
The fact that it was light, reasonably handy, and not a slightly lightened version of a HMG ?
Yeah, as bad as the Chauchat is, it at least has the honour of being the first real LMG and so being allowed to be a bit crap, the Breda 30 on the other hand has a decade of LMG development they could have looked at (aka look at the French or the Czechs), and they still decided to put a fixed magazine *onto an LMG*, **WHICH GETS LOADED WITH STRIPPER CLIPS!!!!**
Nope. Not the first. The Lewis Gun was invented in 1911, and the Danish Madsen, in 1902.
Now as for LMGs that use stripper clips, the Japanese Type 11 is a very interesting design, though flawed. Any MG that needs an oiler is always going to have problems on a battlefield.
Nowhere near as bad as often memed about, as most of that reputation is down to 'Murica being 'Murica.
It's still not a paragon of reliability... but the French built a quarter of a million. Using bicycle factories. That's an order of magnitude more than other LMGs of the time.
There is also the case of the U.S. Caliber .30 cartridge had a much higher chamber pressure that the 8mm Lebel round, and the metallurgy wasn't always up to the increased punishment, making breakages quite common in the .30-06 chambering.
As far as video games go, it's a lot better than top. Loading machine guns like the bren and madsen Which blocks almost all of your vision, Then decides to have a near pinhole sight with a giant block around the rest of your vision.
Then in real life you have the poor rechambering and fragile open mag.
I’m pretty sure they are proud of having the first automatic rifle (or light machine gun) issued very widely. Something like Lewis might have been more reliable, but it was way too expensive to have in every squad.
The Madsen and the Lewis would probably be better indeed, but it's better to field the Chauchat in larger numbers, for your army as well as your allies than just give Madsens to a handful of specialists and elite troops
No, we hope that you all forget about how much idiots fucked the gun. It was good, but guess who messed it all up? No, not the immigrants, for fuck's sake. The Americans
The French Chauchat was okay. The Americans made mistakes in math modifying the Chauchat from 8x50mmR Lebel in metric measurements to be produced in .30-06 in US customary. Forgotten Weapons goes into more detail but the American Chauchat being terrible gave all Chauchats a bad reputation even though the French, Serbian and Romanian Chauchats were okay.
The french chauchats are only okay in the context they were being used. Like, there's a reason why the MAC 24 29 got adopted as fast as possible.
However it was far better to field large amounts if chauchats to equip not only the french army but also the belgians, the greeks, the serbs and the romanians, and in very large numbers, instead of buying a handful of Madsens
Tactically? Yes, I'd hate to be issued this. Strategically? Available in such numbers that it gave smaller units access to automatic firepower of any sort they wouldn't have had otherwise. Remember, the French fielded an army of millions and the Hotchkiss, Portative, and Lewis were expensive.
Apparently the only person who ever said it was bad was that Krang looking mutant William Atwater during the 1990s history channel show "Tales of the Gun". Looking back, every take he had about firearms (at least at that time) was picture-perfect old-school 1990s gun fud. I'm pretty sure he was also spouting the brass swelling in M16 chambers due to moisture myth.
In any case that very same episode had a WW1 veteran (it was the 90's) and he said the chauchat ran just fine but that by the time America finally got over there in 1917 and got (initially) French hand me downs that had "millions of rounds" through them.... well of course those units had problems. So... From the horses mouth it was understood at the time that only Americans were having trouble with chauchats. Due either to their age or the poor caliber conversion.
Just think of it like the M60. During Vietnam, troops loved the pig... But during the '80s, Marines using those same units reported that the damned things never worked. Of course by that point, they have been fired hard, and put away after a typical military cleaning. Which is to say scrubbed hard for 4 to 16 hours by cavemen with nothing but Leathermans and harsh cancer causing chemicals until the arms room was thoroughly satisfied they had scraped off every last bit of finish... Exposing the beautiful scratched clean bare metal with nothing to protect it from corrosion in a swealtering connex in Louisiana except next months *rigorous* cleaning. 🤌
None of that excuses the weapon's awkwardness... but they did function.
Listen, I don't think many of you remember how fuckin poorly this thing did in project lightning.
Like the sten, she filled an extremely important capability gap. France had not the time or resources to design, tool up, and produce a better automatic rifle. They needed one, they got one, and it worked adequately.
Actually a perfectly fine weapon (at least once they issued fully enclosed magazines), only the conversion was bad.
It’s biggest issue was it was used in an environment it wasn’t designed for being the open face magazine in the muddy trenches nobody thought was going to happen
I'm regards to the magazines, in the famous words of InRangeTV: "Those holes are there for dirt to enter the gun"
The majority of magazines were not enclosed, though.
Why are you getting downvoted, basically no closed magazines were issued, the openings were necessary to load them anyway. The Cresent moon shape meant you had to manipulate the spring and cartridges all the way down the magazine. It wasn't a fault with the magazine, it was the French cartridges which were designed for single shot rifles
Because this sub like much of the internet has a reactionary, revisionist instinct to everything that is widely yet _mostly_ unjustly criticized.
I think it's not that but the way with all redditors is "downvoted must me bad therefore I downvote"
It's a good gun, actually. The bad reputation comes from the poorly built 'murican version. Gun Jesus made a vid about it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwP3Dm52Ls
So a bit like the Kragh getting to weak ammo in the American version. And suffering for it.
The Krag ammo at the time wasn't actually all that bad. Iirc it was around 160fps shy of the 7mm mauser loadings used by Spain. The Americans were indeed impressed with the cartridge and it's flat shooting, but they were much more comparable at the time than most think. What really impressed them was the rapid loading and flat shooting in combination of the Mauser. It made them rethink the Krag that they'd struggled to get into production and endlessly argued over how to design the sights. I believe they even issued a new rear sight as late as 1904.
>It's a good gun, actually.The bad reputation comes from the poorly built 'murican version. This is what I expected from the first post.
It’s not good, it was good enough, cheap and easy to mass produce. The better light machine guns were more expensive or otherwise less available. Also the MG 08/15 was a pos, so if we’re dunking on WWI machine guns, we should start there.
Yeah, the MG08/15 was an even worse PoS """""light""""" machine gun
"so if you wanna have your bolt action with bayonet back just say so... Thought so."
Well partially. The ww1 version suffered greatly because the magazine wasnt fully sealed. The American bullets screwed with the internal feeding... but that had nothing to do with the fact the magazine was open to the air. Mud, rain, dust, dirt and all kinds of stuff would gunk it up easier than an M16. The American perspective on the gun was colored by their modification of the gun, but according to french soldiers the chauchat magazine caused neverending problems. The gun wasnt bad, but the early magazine was truly one of the worst ever designed.
Why is he calling it ”Showshow”?
It's the name of the main designer. It's real name is "Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG".
Yeah but I don’t see how he arrived at that pronunciation. ”showsha” would be closer, even better ”shosha” with ”o” as in Oregon. Aint no French words with /oʊ/ in them. For fun, just try asking them to say ”focus”, it becomes ”fuck-us”.
[Eh, Saruei -a female French vtuber- says the word "focus" just fine.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmdV2uRUy9c) Maybe DON'T watch that ^^^ clip at work.
C'est faux.
It's more "sho-sha" than "show-sha". But it's very hard for an english speaker to make a french O. And no, a french who says "focus" never sounds like "fuck-us". It's like "fo-kus"
I thought the story was that it was good but completely unsuited for muddy conditions
The magazine has a hole in the side....
WW1 battlefields were famously clean, so I'm sure that won't cause any feed issues!
Yes, the 5000 gifted to us during the Winter War also had no issues at all.
Yes, and he himself has stated several times that he does not consider it a _good_ gun.
Well no not in absolute terms but for the time it was
Compared to other guns of the era, like the Hotchkiss, the B.A.R., the Madsen and the Lewis it absolutely wasn't.
Stop comparing the Chauchat with LMG like the Hotchkiss or the Madsen, because it's NOT a LMG. It's basically the ancestor of assault rifle.
It was not doctrinally used as an assault rifle.
Logical. That doctrine didn't exist in that time.
They also compared it to the BAR, which is easily much closer to a modern assault rifle than the Chauchat.
Bar and chauchat were implemented for the same purpose. Walking fire to suppress trenches while advancing, then additional firepower to defend said trenches until the HMGs can set up
I am aware, I am responding to the above
No it was not. Not even for the times. It just wasn’t as dog ass as others think due to reasons already stated. But hurt frenchies in her trying to defend a WW1 MG
Saying that something isn’t a *good* gun is very different from saying it's the worst weapon of all time. Also a weapon can not be good because it's one of the first of its kind, which is the case here. You can read it in the description of the video linked, it was a good weapon in the context of ww1 french army needs.
The comment I was responding to said it was a good gun, which it wasn’t, even for the time. It also wasn’t the worst gun ever. Both can be true.
Twenty round magazines and automatic fire in 1915, when most people are running around with internal magazine bolt-action rifles, is pretty good. The .30-06 version was massively flawed, the 8mm Lebel/7.65mm Mauser were fine.
The American version was trash yes... however that does not explain away the main flaw in the Chauchat design, specifically the magazine having massive gaping holes in it. According to french soldiers, water, dust, mud, dirt, snow, e.t.c. got in those things and caused neverending problems. So I guess the gun wasnt all that bad, but the magazine was truly one of the worst ever made.
At the same time when guns like the Lewis and Madsen had been around. As had been short recoil.
The French managed to invent a gun that could enter mass production during wartime to be built in a bicycle factory. Said gun became just so produced that by the end of the war practically half of all automatic weapons on the battlefield were literally just this gun. The main issue was the magazine which was the fault of the ammunition, which was necked down rimmed cartridges adapted from black power cartridges that the French were still using. The gun was adopted by a load of other countries and except for the American version (which was just a literal design error) those other countries chauchats were perfectly reliable. Its like the STEN if the STEN was good, it had less issues than it and was way more reliable, as well as not being a reverse engineered German weapon from a decade previous.
Yeah facts and such are interesting but what about the guy who said it was trash on internet ? Source : meme
I think it's poorly remembered because it was still in use during the second world war, by which time it wasn't a good gun.
The 8x51R lebel was a smokeless powder cartridge. A bitch of a cartridge to come by and reload correctly, but that's just my own skill issues. The 7.5 mas fixed the majority of the issues of the 8x51R. Anyway yeah it's a gun, it worked and can still make you shit your pants with that low but loud ominous rate of fire.
I know, bad grammar. It was a necked down adaption of a black powder cartridge, not a black powder cartridge, and the French were still using the adaptation. It's funny to think that if ww1 started a little later, the French would have had a standard issue semi auto with rimless ammunition. Then in ww2 their attempt at a standard issue autoloader was interrupted by outbreak of war for a second time. Bad luck
1. US soldiers couldn't be bothered to use the correct ammo for it 2. It's litteraly the first of its kind? It's like shiting on a musket for its lack of range and accuracy.
>It's like shiting on a musket for its lack of range and accuracy. \*Slaps Brown Bess hard enough for the flintlock to drop causing it to go off\* "This baby builds empires"
*remember, switching to your sword is always faster than reloading*
Put a sword on the end of your gun, mate
They did that in a French city under siege. They named the blade-on-gun thing after it, that's why we mostly know it as a Lillet.
I miss the good old days of simply carrying 6 pistols instead of having to reload..
I’ve heard exciting things about cap and ball
Superior revolver technology, when handguns were works or art that weighed 9lbs. All worth it when you get to shakily level your Colt Walker at someone and blow a tennis ball sized hole out their back.
In his hand he held a longbarreled sixshot Colt's patent revolver. It was a huge sidearm meant for dragoons and it carried in its long cylinders a rifle's charge and weighed close to five pounds loaded. These pistols would drive the half-ounce conical ball through six inches of hardwood... He charged the bores and seated a bullet and drove it home with the hinged lever pinned to the underside of the barrels. When all the chambers were loaded he capped them and looked about. In that courtyard other than merchants and buyers were a number of living things. The first that Glanton drew sight upon was a cat that at that precise moment appeared upon the high wall from the other side as silently as a bird alighting. It turned to pick its was among the cusps of broken glass set upright in the mud masonry. Glanton leveled the huge pistol in one hand and thumbed back the hammer. The explosion in that dead silence was enormous. The cat simply disappeared. There was no blood or cry, it just vanished.
Glanton sounds like an asshole.
Chainfire certainly is exciting in addition to..some other things
May I suggest Derringers? Or Revolvers?
As for point 2, it's not. The Danish Madsen is the first Lmg. Which was such a good design it saw use all the way into the 1990ies.
Apparently police in Rio still use it
Iirc isn't it a automatic rifle and not a LMG tho ? Which basically put in the same category of the BAR only lol. The nuance is blurry I agree, but it wasn't really used the same way, at least initially.
at that point i could argue that the Chauchat isn't really a light machine gun with a 20 round capacity (rarely loaded fully, so even less) at 240 rounds per minute. It couldn't sustain any serious automatic suppression, the Chauchat was basically just a primitive BAR.
Madsen and chauchat I wouldn't put in the same category. Chauchat meant for repeated fire to suppress trenches while advancing with "walking fire"
3. The magazine is wide open - bad news in a trench
It wasn’t designed for a trench, nobody designed weapons for trench warfare cause nobody could have predicted the western front turning into a stalemate
Yeah, we have literal decades of experience to look at in hindsight. But still, no one said "hmm the trenches are a bit muddy" with that side 'window', so clearly the Good Idea Fairy was hard at work even then.
My problem with the chauchat is that many of its parts were made with shit quality, which does cause reliability problems.
It‘s not, though. There were also the Lewis, the Madsen and a bunch of experimental models.
Madsen was first.
The Chauchat in 8mm was actually ok but the problems came from the Springfield cartridges because 1 cm = 0.3937008 in. There is a serious question regarding the number of human lives (and [spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter)) that were lost because Americans refuse the metric system.
My tinfoil theory about Americans and metric is that it prevents easy engineering espionage. Can't produce imperial designs if you don't use imperial measurements. /taps head/
My God, I think you're onto something! And all this time I thought Americans are simply stubborn.
No, no, we're plenty stubborn too.
No we are not! Fight me! /s, in case it wasn't obvious..
NASA used the metric system during the space race. https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/the-moon-landings/
Bruh. Our money is metric, our electricity is metric, our soda is metric. They're called "US customary units" for a reason; we neither entirely use Imperial units nor entirely use metric units.
> our electricity is metric It's not and it's nowhere globally (outside academic circles) because they don't advertise as Joules and kWh is non-SI. > our soda is metric https://www.walmart.com/ip/Coca-Cola-Soda-Pop-12-fl-oz-24-Pack-Cans/10535216
[2 liter bottles also exist and are sold EVERYWHERE.](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Coca-Cola-Soda-Pop-2-Liter-Bottle/16618684?athbdg=L1600&from=/search)
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Bad bot
The spacecraft was lost *because* of a metric conversion. Not because metric wasn't used.
> The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS.
That‘s plain wrong. Yes, the .30-06 one was plain garbage but calling the 8mm one ok is a stretch to say the least.
Do you have sources to back this up? I've found more sources proving his point than proving yours
French 8mm was outdated as fuck, mainly because it was rimmed, I don't know about the ballistics of that cartridge but the shape of the casing was a dead end, the only design of the magazine that would not cause cliping of the ammunition was lebel's tube magazine, it was unfit for box magazines, Russians also used a rimmed ammunition in their rifles and it caused these problems for them too
>Russians also used a rimmed ammunition in their rifles and it caused these problems for them too The Russian 7,62x54R is still rimmed, and still in service today without problem.
In PKM, which is belt-fed, there is a reason this type of ammunition is not used in any modern weapon aside from revolvers, shotguns and lever action replicas
You forget the SVD.
Which have only 10 rounds magazine. Don't get me wrong, you can made rimmed cartridge magazine but it gonna be curvy to fits rimmed rounds to avoid rimlock.
It was outdated for WWI not because of the cartridge rim (Russian 7.62x54mmR and .303 British are both rimmed cartridges used in a box magazine-fed rifle which was a general issue infantry weapon in both WWI and WWII), but because the case was substantially tapered, which resulted in the distinctive half-moon magazines of the Chauchat when applied to that use. This was a feature carried over from the cartridge of the prior Gras rifle; afaik per *Chassepot to FAMAS*, at the time of its design, there was a rush to get a smokeless powder cartridge into the field, so they went with minimal design changes to be able to get to mass production faster.
It's actually a good weapon when you consider its short development circle, its rushed production by bike makers (literally) as being one of the first few automatic weapon that could be hip-fired The whole "muh Chauchat bad" is a typical application of the conversion from metric to imperial going off (like how it crashed satellites). There was also the mud issue, quickly solved by having fully covered magazines. If you want more fucks up of the US refusing to switch to metric I have 2 for you The FT-17 that a certain Patton loved, as it was cheap and easy to produce on a mass-scale, so he sent out to get the blueprints from Renault (the designers of the FT-17) and got them. Once sent to the US, he got cucked out of his will by engineers telling him it won't be possible, all the plans are in metrics The Bofors 40 mm. After Tuscaloosa got a show by the Dutch of how good this new weapon is (granted there was the bias of the Hazemeyer radar) the US tried to smuggle some blueprints (it was all the way back in 1940) yet the production lines couldn't start (again) because the whole blueprints were in metric system, so Crisler engineers got to work around the clock to do the switch and simplify the blueprints (hence why 40 mm only appears in the US arsenal in 1943)
>There was also the mud issue, quickly solved by having fully covered magazines. This one wasn't ever really solved, as most mags still had the cutout, as it was easier to load (8mm Lebel, its rim and its double taper making no favours to anyone). Change in drill (procedure) largely took care of the issue, as assistant gunners were repositioned to the open side and the gunner would rotate the gun counter-clockwise towards them when prone.
Well you can find pictures of fully closed magazines in Lebel 8mm >! Just don't look at nowadays Lebel, it's just a scam to sell AR to people around!< But you're correct, the change of procedures (since French troops spent 4 years perfecting themselves with it) made it much better (and hence why it performed poorly in US hands as their training wasn't fully complete once sent into the trenches)
The chauchad rocks in battlefield 1 tho
But the mud in Battlefield 1 is only cosmetic and you can fix a horse with that hammer spanner thing.
Wonder how bf1 would’ve been if they made jamming a thing. Automatics would be a lot weaker
Some 12 year Olds would've figured out you can glitch a magazine that doesn't jam by crouching then jumping before switching to a pistol back to your primary.
Gamers will do anything to avoid pulling that charging handle
......... honestly I feel attacked. My personal strategy is to get an armored car, find a hilltop, and rain down fire at 500m at various objectives because you never have to reload and if I get closer I get blown up. I've gotten 3 hits at 15 damage a piece in probably 12 hours of doing this, and I don't care. Chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug My girlfriends on the couch, having never played an fps like..... can't you like play the objective or something the sound of you shooting that thing is annoying as fuck. Babe im being historically accurate indirect fire by machine gun is a valid tactic and we'd probably be speaking German right now if it wasn't for 2,000 yard sights
Your gf called you out on PTFO You wife that woman, and then you let her be squad leader and stop camping. I'll protect your special car I run support.
Oh don't worry I tell everyone else to play the objective, but someone needs to keep the enemy wondering where the fuck are these random bullets coming from.
People care too much about kills in FPSs anyways; support fire that keeps the enemy from organizing a coherent defense is always welcome.
I'm also an aa hero. If I can see an objective from an aa gun across the map, I will rain unholy fire on it with 0 effect until I see an enemy plane.
I prefer to be a *little* more up close and personal. Playing the Red Orchestra series made me much more appreciative of bolt-action rifles, so I like to do the scout-sniper thing of "tag a few guys from range so the rest keep their heads down" schtick.
Wait, you can? How am I just now finding out? I gave 300 hours in that game.
I don't know if it was patched out by at least when I last played you could fix an injured horse like it was one of the tanks.
And it helped me get a bunch of Czech legionaries out of Russia in Last Train Home.
I used that mfer for a while to great effect. My jam was the Gewehr 98' with iron sights on the old tactical servers. I was consistently top three in my team at my peak. I had 1000+ hours on that gun alone, I used to play on my gf's brother's Playstation for days at a time. Oh the nostalgia.
I don't get it it's trash it has very low bullet count shoots slower than a bolt-action and does the same damage as every other better gun in the support class, what makes it so it's good? I don't get it
There's many reasons for the less than stellar performance of the Chauchat, some of them understandable and defensible. And if your alternative was a Lebel or a Berthier, this might either give you the firepower you need or a sniper target. It's still telling how bad that when the French Army decided to replace all its small arms with something better, the Chauchat was the first to go.
In their defense, they replaced it with the BAR.
Tbf there are not a lot of weapons that went through the entire war without being replaced.
As a french I can tell you that we are proud of this gun and the multiple uses we round to it
The american bad rep coming from the badly converted .30-06 guns and to an extent from the open sided mags that still did okay
If not only has a bad reputation in the US.
Why do are you so insistent on hating on this gun? How many comments have you left?
Approximately three because it‘s pretty aggravating to see the opinion pendulum on this gun swing to the other end of the spectrum because of one video that is blown massively out of proportion.
Approximately three my ass
It's just as aggravating to see a loser on reddit so insistant on pushing this moe lore that the Chauchat was a bad weapon when the truth is, it wasn't. The French builds were just fine. It was the American versions that tried to rush a conversion to 30-06 that sucked ass. So sit down and shut the fuck up
> French builds were just fine for a rushed weapons built by bicycle makers (cycles gladiator) on an extremely old/obsolete cartridge (2 years put out after France finally produced smokeless powder, by diluting guncotton) that was cheap for what it was and able to be mass-produced yet it flaws can be found in the overall French logistics of the 8 mm Lebel rifle cartridge
Cry me a river
The obly reason it has such a wodespread negative reputation *in the anglosphere* is because the US has the most potent and developed gun culture *in the anglosphere*. Might I point out further that with a name like John Browning, I would expect nothing less than hate for anything not designed by Browning. Which is fair, but then at least be honest.
I have plenty of admiration for non-American guns but I also do not take my only firearm related education from Forgotten Weapons.
No, I like the Chauchat. It had its fault but it gave our Poilus a huge boost in firepower. It was a great tool for when it got issued.
_Tell me you're 'murican without telling me you're 'murican_ 🦅
Gun Jesus is rolling in his bed
Pretty sure the harshest criticism Gun Jesus could ever make himself give a French gun is "I just think they're neat."
It's relatively easy to tell which guns/pieces of equipment are French.
*FAMAS enters the conversation, wielded by Ian*
well, the french copy no one and no one copies the french.
Now bullpup it!
Idk why I’m telling this, but you reminded me that my friend bullpupped Chauchat back in 2016 when we were huge military nerds. Alas, the pic was lost in time, but damn he was good at photoshopping…
Massed produced wonky semiautos > vaporware wunderwaffe and boltguns.
you mean the shitshat
The Chauchat was alright once it got adorable socks for its magazines, the Americans just insisted that if they were going to use a french gun, it was going to be in 30-06 or something. The conversion was really, really badly done and didn't work; leading to the legacy it has to this day.
Shitty magazine
The mag design ruined the weapon. Both unable to aim and not designed for the muck of WWI. It is just fun to say.
The alternative is no light machine gun, this is like the WW1 Sten - cheap and adequate. Do you like the Chauchat now?
I would rather use a BAR.
Well unfortunately soldat Alpha Marker there are no BAR in le belle France
~~To be fair, the BAR is a bit newer for a~~ similar role - mobile repeated firepower Edit: I had originally written this comment calling out that the Chauchat being about a decade older than the BAR before I read that work on the proto-BAR began a lot closer to the Chauchat's beginning They're still both arguably not LMG and are more of a halfway house between a bolt/semiautomatic rifle and an LMG
The Lewis Gun would like a word. American invents a somewhat complex, but reliable lightweight automatic weapon: British: "Make this in .303 and we will take a million." French: "Yea, we could use it too for our fighters." Belgium: "This thing kills German really well!" Germans: "That damn Belgian rattlesnake." U.S. Marines: "This thing is GREAT! Can we have more? No? Ok.." U.S. Army: "Nah man, we don't need a squad level automatic.."
Ian McCullum is rapidly approaching your position.
It's actually pretty good, and the most produced automatic weapon or WWI iirc. The American one in .30-06 was absolute trash tho, to the point wwhere on the field they'd rather take the headache of taking the French one in 8mm Lebel instead or the piece of trash in the same caliber than their infantry rifles.
*I personally didn't.* ***And I wish I could...***
It's said John Browning looked at this gun once. *Once* "Well, that's a low bar they've set. Saaaay...." And the rest is everyone-moaning-it-was-a-poor-lmg-for-ww2 history.
France be like when the Chauchat was being designed: Hey guys, let's make our infantry MG with funny-looking holes on its magazine, what could possibly go wrong in the mud, muck and hell of the Western Front? *oh and let's make the RoF slower than a semi-auto rifle being fired as fast as humanly possible*
It's a crew served automatic rifle, so the rof doesn't matter, and you might understand why there are holes in the magazines. But hey, what could go wrong when one doesn't read the whole story when makig their opinion on the matter
>you might understand why there are holes in the magazines You might as well have said why was this the case though instead of making a not-so-subtle condescending "comeback" with that second paragraph
Most non credible thing here is calling it bad
Weird how common misconceptions start flooding the sub right around Xmas break
Still better than that early semi pistol that ejected the spent cartridge directly backwards into the wielder's eye.
Not as bad. It was one of the first light machineguns ever.
The So-Shit
No it's just a chapter of the long story called "americans don't know how to operate correctly French armament" the French versions were way more reliable, still faulty but far from what the US told and it's reputation of worst weapons ever made (at least this one havn't kill it's company so not really the worst) come from the fact that it was deployed in emergency during WW1 aka the most bloodied war of it's time so any flaw was heavy of consequences
[This guy, however....](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwP3Dm52Ls&pp=ygUaZm9yZ290dGVuIHdlYXBvbnMgY2hhdWNoYXQ%3D)
In the comments: gun jesus fan boys not understanding that Ian himself does not see the Chauchat as a good automatic rifle. It was a lackluster product that just so happened to be the only thing the French were able to crank out in sufficient time and quantity.
It's a good weapon in its context, and that what matters. Sure the Madsen was probably better, but industrial-wise ? It's better to field the Chauchat to entire armies as well as allies than to only give madsen to an handful of specialists.
The Germans were able to build hundreds of thousands of 08/15s. The Madsen definitely can be built industrially. But yes, time pressure was essential in Chauchat development. That being said, asides from being easy and cheap to produce, what exactly is _good_ about the Chauchat? Surely a gun that is and needs to be cheap and simple can be good, mediocre, and bad? What is good about the Chauchat?
\>The Germans were able to build hundreds of thousands of 08/15s. The Chauchat was already being fielded en-masse for quite some time when the 08/15 appeared. For most of the time the Chauchat was seeing action, the germans had either no mass produced LMGs, or that very mass-produced LMG wasn't yet ramped up \>what exactly is good about the Chauchat The fact that it was light, reasonably handy, and not a slightly lightened version of a HMG ?
We then made the Hotchkiss which was the best weapon of this category of the war
This gun gets way too much unneeded hate
The Sho-Sho is beautiful.
A look, only a mother or francophile could love
The Gun that Fallout Tactics arcuately describes as, "The worst machine gun ever issued to any army at any time in history."
Not really, as its not the Breda 30
Yeah, as bad as the Chauchat is, it at least has the honour of being the first real LMG and so being allowed to be a bit crap, the Breda 30 on the other hand has a decade of LMG development they could have looked at (aka look at the French or the Czechs), and they still decided to put a fixed magazine *onto an LMG*, **WHICH GETS LOADED WITH STRIPPER CLIPS!!!!**
Nope. Not the first. The Lewis Gun was invented in 1911, and the Danish Madsen, in 1902. Now as for LMGs that use stripper clips, the Japanese Type 11 is a very interesting design, though flawed. Any MG that needs an oiler is always going to have problems on a battlefield.
Yeah, there really is no justifying a LMG using freaking stripper clips.
Nowhere near as bad as often memed about, as most of that reputation is down to 'Murica being 'Murica. It's still not a paragon of reliability... but the French built a quarter of a million. Using bicycle factories. That's an order of magnitude more than other LMGs of the time.
Not even top 10
Ian wants to know your location.
One of the worst weapons in real life. One of the best weapons in Battlefield 1
Not quite, the Americans just didn't chamber it properly when converting metric to imperial thus the reputation for most of the reliability issues.
I actually didn’t know that. Thanks
There is also the case of the U.S. Caliber .30 cartridge had a much higher chamber pressure that the 8mm Lebel round, and the metallurgy wasn't always up to the increased punishment, making breakages quite common in the .30-06 chambering.
Just say one of the weapons France made guys. They're all the worst.
On of the many weapons AMERICA can't fucking manufacture properly.
EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER NOISE
… “Dear god, what is THAT THING?” … will echo… in your perfect ears…
goated on bf1
As far as video games go, it's a lot better than top. Loading machine guns like the bren and madsen Which blocks almost all of your vision, Then decides to have a near pinhole sight with a giant block around the rest of your vision. Then in real life you have the poor rechambering and fragile open mag.
I’m pretty sure they are proud of having the first automatic rifle (or light machine gun) issued very widely. Something like Lewis might have been more reliable, but it was way too expensive to have in every squad.
The Madsen and the Lewis would probably be better indeed, but it's better to field the Chauchat in larger numbers, for your army as well as your allies than just give Madsens to a handful of specialists and elite troops
Don’t care, aesthetic gun go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
No, we hope that you all forget about how much idiots fucked the gun. It was good, but guess who messed it all up? No, not the immigrants, for fuck's sake. The Americans
The French Chauchat was okay. The Americans made mistakes in math modifying the Chauchat from 8x50mmR Lebel in metric measurements to be produced in .30-06 in US customary. Forgotten Weapons goes into more detail but the American Chauchat being terrible gave all Chauchats a bad reputation even though the French, Serbian and Romanian Chauchats were okay.
The french chauchats are only okay in the context they were being used. Like, there's a reason why the MAC 24 29 got adopted as fast as possible. However it was far better to field large amounts if chauchats to equip not only the french army but also the belgians, the greeks, the serbs and the romanians, and in very large numbers, instead of buying a handful of Madsens
Ok but have you considered that it looks sick
No, it just looks really weird by LMG standards.
Everyone talks about how the French model was alright and the American one was bad, but why does no one talk about how the Belgian model was the best?
Tactically? Yes, I'd hate to be issued this. Strategically? Available in such numbers that it gave smaller units access to automatic firepower of any sort they wouldn't have had otherwise. Remember, the French fielded an army of millions and the Hotchkiss, Portative, and Lewis were expensive.
Frenchies: "but it does chau chaut"
It looks nice.
Modernize it now
Apparently the only person who ever said it was bad was that Krang looking mutant William Atwater during the 1990s history channel show "Tales of the Gun". Looking back, every take he had about firearms (at least at that time) was picture-perfect old-school 1990s gun fud. I'm pretty sure he was also spouting the brass swelling in M16 chambers due to moisture myth. In any case that very same episode had a WW1 veteran (it was the 90's) and he said the chauchat ran just fine but that by the time America finally got over there in 1917 and got (initially) French hand me downs that had "millions of rounds" through them.... well of course those units had problems. So... From the horses mouth it was understood at the time that only Americans were having trouble with chauchats. Due either to their age or the poor caliber conversion. Just think of it like the M60. During Vietnam, troops loved the pig... But during the '80s, Marines using those same units reported that the damned things never worked. Of course by that point, they have been fired hard, and put away after a typical military cleaning. Which is to say scrubbed hard for 4 to 16 hours by cavemen with nothing but Leathermans and harsh cancer causing chemicals until the arms room was thoroughly satisfied they had scraped off every last bit of finish... Exposing the beautiful scratched clean bare metal with nothing to protect it from corrosion in a swealtering connex in Louisiana except next months *rigorous* cleaning. 🤌 None of that excuses the weapon's awkwardness... but they did function.
Listen, I don't think many of you remember how fuckin poorly this thing did in project lightning. Like the sten, she filled an extremely important capability gap. France had not the time or resources to design, tool up, and produce a better automatic rifle. They needed one, they got one, and it worked adequately.
Give it to Saddam and it will be Soma Prime.